Collocation and translation

1. Collocation and translation MA Literary Translation- Lesson 2 prof. Hugo Bowles February 2 2007

2. Why do you say deep water and not profound water? • “A word is known by the company it keeps” (JR Firth) - tremble with fear tremble with excitement* - quiver with excitement quiver with fear* There is no definable reason why we choose to say “tremble with fear” but not “quiver with fear”. It is simply a question of COLLOCATION.

3. What is collocation? • COLLOCATION refers to a relationship between words that frequently occur together • The words together can mean more than the sum of their parts (The Times of India, disk drive) - other examples: hot dog, mother in law • Examples of collocations • noun phrases like strong teaand weapons of mass destruction • phrasal verbs like to make up, and other phrases like the rich and powerful. • Valid or invalid? • a stiff breezebut not a stiff wind(while either a strong breeze or a strong wind is okay). • broad daylight(but not bright daylightor narrow darkness).

4. Collocational meaning (1) • Collocational meaning refers to the associations that a word acquires in its collocation: e.g. girl boy boy man woman car pretty flower handsome overcoat garden airline colour typewriter village vessel

5. Collocational meaning (2) • A word can gain different collocational meaning in different contexts: e.g. green on the job white man green fruit white wine green with envy white noise white coffee These different meanings of “green” and “white”are polysemous but they are caused by the different collocation, i.e. the change in verbal context

6. Criteria for collocations • Typical criteria for collocations: - non-compositionality - non-substitutability - non-modifiability. • Collocations usually cannot be translated into other languages word by word. • A phrase can be a collocation even if it is not consecutive (as in the example knock . . . door).

7. Non-compositionality • A phrase is compositional if the meaning can predicted from the meaning of the parts. • e.g. new companies • A phrase is non-compositional if the meaning cannot be predicted from the meaning of the parts • e.g. hot dog • Collocations are not necessarily fully compositional in that there is usually an element of meaning added to the combination. e.g. strong tea. • Idioms are the most extreme examples of non-compositionality. e.g. to hear it through the grapevine.

8. Non-substitutability • We cannot substitute near-synonyms for the components of a collocation. e.g. We can’t say yellow wine instead of white wineeven though yellow is as good a description of the color of white wine as white is (it is kind of a yellowish white). • Many collocations cannot be freely modified with additional lexical material or through grammatical transformations (Non-modifiability). • E.g. white wine, but not whiter wine • mother in law, but not mother in laws

9. Linguistic Subclasses of Collocations • Light verbs: - Verbs with little semantic content like make, take and do. - e.g. make lunch, take easy, • Verb particle constructions - e.g. to go down • Proper nouns - e.g. Bill Clinton • Terminological expressionsrefer to concepts and objects in technical domains. - e.g. Hydraulic oil filter

10. Collocations at a distance • Many collocations occur at variable distances. For example knock collocates with door but at a distance - she knocked on his door - they knocked at the door - 100 women knocked on Donaldson’s door - a man knocked on the metal front door

11. Finding collocations • Software is able to scan texts for the most frequently collocated words using the criterion of frequency, i.e. by counting the words which most frequently appear together • This usually produces a lot of function words which need to be filtered out

12. This shows the most frequent collocations of pairs of words (bigrams) in a corpus of newspaper articles. The are all function words (except New York) An example of a frequency count

13. This chart shows the most frequent collocations after filtering out the function words. The capital letters refer to the part of speech (A = Adjective, N = Noun) Frequency count after filtering

14. Translation problems with collocations • Temptation to follow the english collocation (dry - secco; gentle - gentile) • Not understanding the meaning of the collocation (dry cow) • Culture specific collocations (Union Jack) • Understanding when collocations are marked (heavy gambler) • Translating marked collocations (heavy non-smoker)

15. Translation problems with idioms • Understanding the idioms • English idioms with no equivalent in Italian • Understanding when idioms are marked (“you’re getting on my breasts”) • Translating marked idioms • Understanding when idioms have been manipulated (silver linings and all that) • Translating manipulated idioms

16. Idioms - characteristics (1) • Idioms are strictly non-compositional Although the word that make up the idiom have Their own literal meanings, in the idiom they have lost their individual identity. You canot predict the meaning of an idiom from the sum of its parts: e.g. how do you do? I’m under the weather to wear your heart on your sleeve red herring

17. Idioms - characteristics (2) • Structural stability (syntactic frozenness) 1. Constituents cannot be replaced e.g. as good as gold / as good as play ? 2. Word order cannot be changed e.g. tit for tat / tat for tit? 3. Constituents cannot be deleted or added to e.g. out of the question / out of question ?

18. DictionariesPlease ask Sara Laviosa which ones she recommends • The LTP Dictionary of Selected Collocations • Oxford Collocations Dictionary for Students of English • Cambridge International Dictionary of Idioms • Collins COBUILD Dictionary of Idioms • Oxford Dictionary of English Idioms